Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Nosh 148: 'The Best of Enemies,' 'Diane' & More

David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.

APPETIZER (Reviews: The
Best of Enemies and Diane)

The Best of Enemies

Best of
Enemies was a swell title for 2015’s
documentary about the snobby, cat-claw feud of writers Gore Vidal and William
F. Buckley Jr. Now The Best of Enemies
suits the directorial debut of writer Robin Bissell. He does it by the book
(Osha Gray Davison’s is the source), using well-stitched plot seams and a
history lesson not written in shiny crayon. If you don’t know about the 1971
school integration crisis in Durham, North Carolina, here’s your chance, delivered
by an excellent cast.

Taraji P. Henson, 12 years
beyond her saucy dish Vernell (“fine as frog’s hair”) in Talk to Me, is the buxom motor of protest Ann Atwater. Her ramrod fury
at white racism finds a perfect lightning rod: Claiborne “C.P.” Ellis, the
bantam-cock head of the Durham Klan. That means Sam Rockwell in high strut of
prime, already Oscar-crowned by his rascal rube Dixon in Three Billboards. Slouching his lean body, slurping cornmeal dialog,
casting foxy-yokel glances, C.P. is a nest of ill-educated insecurities, but no
fool – he’s like the Last Gift of William Faulkner. As the story pivot he will learn
to face his Dixie-dosed racism through empathy (and his resentment of the White
Citizens Council squires who lord over his fellow rednecks). He and Ann head
opposing sides of a biracial conciliation group forged by a brave black organizer
(Babou Ceesay). Most whites clearly consider the effort a delaying tactic.

Over 133 minutes, the rooted atmosphere and solid pacing
allow the characters to evolve. The one forcing touch is famous songs, to cue episodes
(like Roy Orbison’s “Blue Bayou” for a Klan terror shooting). The old class
structure looms heavily over gas station manager C.P.’s near-poverty. His loyal
wife (Anne Heche) doesn’t really care for the white-sheet gang, but she knows
the Klan gives him status among larger males. Henson’s bold-eyed power remains
humanly scaled, while Rockwell fulfills one of his best roles. His scene with a
thoughtful Vietnam vet and his closing speech at the tense vote on integration
are absolutely true, without any ham drippings. It happened, and it still
resonates.

Diane

Mary Kay Place is the heart and soul of Diane. It’s been a long road since her
cute, chipper Loretta on Mary Hartman,
Mary Hartman and Meg in The Big Chill.
As Diane, Place at 70 gets the kind of crowner that Harry Dean Stanton found at
57 in Paris, Texas. This is no art
triumph like that picture, but still a fully realized work. Critic Kent Jones (Hitchcock/Truffaut and A Letter to Elia) wrote it for Place, and
directed with savvy, granular admiration. You can see Kazan roots in it, also
bits of Cassavetes and Altman and Ken Loach. Jones and Place lace a double
helix of intimacy and candor that movies
seldom achieve, and without any “chick
flick” safety bumpers.

We plunge into Diane’s tired, aging life in some
wintry-rainy New England town. A giver, she cares greatly for her gallant, dying
friend Donna (Deirdre O’Connell). She frets about her sorta grown son Brian
(Jake Lacy), who’s into his latest drug crisis, masking it badly, driving her
half-crazy. Diane, while no saint, is devoted to helping the needy, and to
funny chat sessions with a close-knit spread of very living people. This film
might not win highly aesthetic critics, but they should see how every shot
serves these people, their milieu and beat-up fortitude. As the junkie son, Lacy
doesn’t go for sob appeal. O’Connell has a touch of an angel readying for takeoff,
but also carries an old beef about Diane. There is a splendid small job by
Andrea Martin, that hip bird of comedy on SCTV,
still beaky and sharp-tongued, yet gazing at pal Diane with total, loving
sympathy.

When Brian bunkers into born-again religion, hectoring
his resistant mother, the movie wobbles but recovers its poise. In a wonderful
scene, feeling her losses, Diane gets soused in a bar and dances alone to an
old rock favorite. She feels nagged by guilt about a ruined marriage, the
betrayal of a friend, and Brian’s judgments. The film doesn’t indulge in
flashbacks to lay all that out for us, like soapy testimonials. Diane is neither drama nor documentary,
but some sort of tonally superb hybrid. Place affirms her place, at last, among
the greats of movie acting.

SALAD (A List)

The salad is listless this week – but more to come!

WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson
Welles’s ticket to rise, most potently in theater and film, most profitably in
radio, was his amazingly supple voice. It declared “his prodigal gifts,
speaking in complete sentences at age two, supposedly analyzing Nietzsche by
ten, performing Shakespeare in his teens, staging the ‘voodoo Macbeth’ at 20.
The preternaturally mature instrument helped enable the orphaned, 16-year-old,
rather baby-faced Welles to literally talk his way into roles with Dublin’s
Gate Theatre. Listen to the talk of an average teenage boy, even one who’s an
actor, and ask yourself if anyone in their right mind would cast him in a commercial
stage production as the evil Duke in Jew
Süss, Welles’s first role at the Gate.” (From Farran Smith Nehme’s essay
“The Voice of Orson Welles,” in the info booklet for Criterion’s blu-ray of The Magnificent Ambersons.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In
1960 ambush photographers got the glamor peg of a new name, paparazzi, from the
frisky, furtive Paparazzo (Walter Santesso) in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. But the lens pest had long roots: “When Mark Twain
visited England in 1907, Rudyard Kipling saw press cameras ‘click-clicking like
gun locks.’ In 1920s London, Aldous Huxley noticed ‘newspapers men, ramping up
and down like wolves.’ The definitive New York photo-prowler was Weegee (Arthur
Fellig), ruthless noir scavenger of the hard-living and newly dead, often
murdered. In 1933 James Cagney grinned and pounced in Picture Snatcher, its rhymed promotion anticipating Weegee: ‘He’ll stop at nothing for a shot/ At
something sexy while it’s hot / Your sins to him are bread and butter/ He’s
right behind you, lens and shutter.” (From the Marcello Mastroianni/La Dolce Vita chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon,
Nook and Kindle.)

David Elliott's book

About Me

David Elliott was film critic of the Chicago Daily News, USA Today, San Diego Union-Tribune, SDNN.com, The Reader (San Diego), and covered arts and entertainment for the Chicago Sun-Times. Retired but not hibernating, he lives in green Eugene, Oregon. (Photo by Travis Elliott.)